TWO CENTURIES AGO — in 1822 — U.S. President James Monroe UNILATERALLY issued “The Monroe Doctrine,” which asserted the U.S. government’s right to do whatever it wants to any and all nations in Latin America — and threatened war against any European nation that threatened to stop us.
The U.S. has been acting upon that imperialist doctrine — in violation of Latin American people’s yearning for freedom and democracy. The U.S. has intervened militarily in many Latin American nations, overthrown many democratic governments, installed dictators, funded extremely brutal dictators and death squads, and allowed U.S. business corporations to exploit the people and their environment. In recent decades “anti-communism” and the “War on Drugs” have been the U.S. government’s convenient excuses for doing that.
For nearly 60 years the U.S. has enabled right-wing governments in Colombia to commit horrible violence as part of this tradition. In 2016 a peace agreement has been bringing this extreme violence to an end. Win Without War (www.winwithoutwar.org) posted this next paragraph on July 15, 2022:
Justice and reconciliation are slow and grinding processes, but they are possible. Colombia’s Truth Commission recently released a report detailing the crimes of a nearly six-decade civil conflict in the country, a key outcome of a 2016 peace agreement between the government and FARC. Reckoning with rights violations and naming perpetrators is a key step in stabilizing post-conflict societies, both for the people of those societies themselves and for governments — like the United States — that helped fuel the conflict from afar.